Question

Paris Peace Conference was one of the greatest shortcomings of the global leaders of those times. Elucidate.

Answer 1

The Paris Peace Conference was an international meeting convened in January 1919 at Versailles just outside Paris. The purpose of the meeting was to establish the terms of the peace after World War. Though nearly thirty nations participated, the representatives of Great Britain, France, the United States, and Italy became known as the "Big Four." The "Big Four" would dominate the proceedings that led to the formulation of the Treaty of Versailles. But due to various reasons Paris Peace Conference is considered as one of the greatest shortcomings of the global leaders of those times.

• The conference produced the worst of all worlds, with nationalistic conflicts left unresolved and sometimes worsened.
• Even in Italy, a victorious power, it led to irredentist resentment.
• The defeated countries (which were mostly barely consulted), harboured immense grievances which rendered their domestic and foreign politics hostile and aggressive.
• League of Nations, which had been created to settle unresolved conflicts and smooth out the problems of the peace settlement, was crucially weakened from the outset by the refusal of the world's most powerful nation, the USA, to enter, as a result of an isolationist Congress.
• The instabilities created by the various peace settlements have often been seen as a direct cause of World War II.

While it is true that Mussolini and Hitler came to power partly through exploiting the resentment caused by the Paris Peace Conference, but it would be wrong to conclude that its outcome made World War II inevitable. There was a period of considerable calm and normalization in the 1920s, while it was the economic crisis immediately after the war (1918–23) and during the Great Depression that made continental Europe so volatile and gave nationalist movements their potency.